Install

I’ve been intending to deploy NSX-T 2.4 since it’s release a few months ago to check out what’s new.

With that, I learned a little about a repeatable workflow to deploy it in a relatively easy way.

Let’s get started

This assumes you already have your vCenter deployed with a vSphere cluster and port groups set up. For NSX-T 2.4 (-T hereafter), you don’t have separate controllers from your manager, you can deploy a single manager and then add additional managers to make it a cluster. You’ll want 1 or 3 NSX Managers, depending if this is a lab, testing, or production; and if it’s a cluster, you’ll likely want an additional IP to serve as the cluster VIP. If you’re keeping count, that’s four (4) IPs, which is how I’m going to deploy it.

This error may be old news to a lot of you, but I’m finally getting back into playing with the goodness known as Microsoft’s System Center Configuration Manager, aka ConfigMgr, aka SCCM, and went through quite a bit to get it set up in my lab.

I jumped right in and did it blindly, which, although worked fine, I did have some speed bumps along the way.

I used several PowerShell one-liners I slapped together to install all the Windows’ features & WADK; however, when I got to the SQL portion of the SCCM installer (where you point to the SQL FQDN, Insance Name, Database name, etc), I kept getting a very generic error that simply said

At face value, this sounds like a simple network connectivity issue. However, I could nslookup the FQDN of the SQL server, which happened to be the same box (all-in-one install), I could ping the FQDN, netstat showed port 1433 was listening, my firewall was turned off, so I started googling.

Everyone points at these as the problem:

Firewall

SPN

SQL Port

Maybe a few others I’m forgetting?

As it turned out, I forgot to enable and start the Remote Registry service. That’s all it was. I actually had this in my notes:

PowerShell

1

2

Set-ServiceRemoteRegistry-StartupTypeAutomatic

Start-ServiceRemoteRegistry

But forgot to run them, lol!

Oh well, live & learn! I think I’m going to do another post regarding the different one-liners I ran to get SCCM 2012 R2 up and running.